February 25, 2025 
Swedish dressage rider Carl Hedin spends a lot of time considering what makes his horses “happy.” His method for evaluating their day-to-day satisfaction is based on the three Fs: friends, forage, and freedom.
Freedom to move in the paddock, time to forage and chew on food, and friends that allow his horses to co-exist as the social animals they are. “If I’m in doubt, if I can be sure that these Fs are working, then I know my horse will have a fulfilled life,” Hedin told the FEI.
In some ways, the ‘three Fs’ might feel like a novel concept, even if a majority of good horse owners intuitively understand the idea. After all, any pony clubber or 4-H kid knows horses are herd animals that shouldn’t spend their lives in their stalls. Or that grazing and chewing on hay and forage are essential to a horse’s day-to-day survival and wellbeing.
In high performance dressage, however, the need to understand what horse welfare really means is a popular subject of late. Though followers of the sport have been sounding the alarm against rollkur and other extreme training practices for years, a slew of recent incidents has put dressage in the international spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
Last summer, shortly before the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, Britain’s golden girl Charlotte Dujardin was suspended by the FEI when videos surfaced showing her using a whip excessively on a horse in training. Ditto for Danish rider Andreas Helgstrand, who was issued various sanctions in 2024.
In response, the FEI has created a Dressage Working Group to move horse welfare to the forefront.
Comprised of an international group of experts and helmed by the USA’s George Williams—former President of the United States Dressage Federation (USDF), US Equestrian Dressage Youth Coach, and High Performance & Pathway Development Advisor—the FEI’s Working Group aims to carry out a full review of the current state of dressage with an eye toward prioritizing equine ethics and wellbeing.
“Dressage should be built on balanced, ethical training resulting in freedom of movement, ease in transitions, and harmony between horse and rider, with no place for tension or resistance,” FEI Dressage Director Ronan Murphy said.
“Our focus now is to embed these principles in the FEI Rule Book and ensure they are applied consistently in training and competition, always putting horse welfare first.
“The Working Group’s task is to turn these ideals into everyday practices, prioritizing the wellbeing of horses as we move forward with future proposals and format changes.”
The rest of the panel includes Olympians Monica Theodorescu (GER) and Kyra Kyrklund (FIN), decorated British rider Gareth Hughes, Olympic Ground Jury President Raphael Saleh (FRA), German National Federation Dressage Committee Chairman Klaus Roeser (GER), and DVM/PhD Lise Berg (DEN).
It’s an impressive list, to be sure. Yet when it comes to questions of welfare, it’s worth asking whether the FEI Working Group will go far enough to break the mold that created its problem to begin with?
Scoring for Science
Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior and seeks to create a thorough understanding of how animals think, feel, and perceive the world. That’s something that Equine Ethologist Renate Larssen believes is essential for equestrians of every discipline to consider in order to build mutually beneficial relationships with their horses—and even more vital for those who train and compete.
“From my perspective, the main issue is the disconnect between scientific evidence and the way dressage is practiced and judged,” said Larssen.
“There is robust and growing evidence highlighting the detrimental effects of things such as tight nosebands and overbent necks. A recent systematic review and meta-analysis of head and neck positions showed that riding with the horse’s head even slightly behind the vertical risks negatively impacting their welfare.
“This is something that needs to be addressed both by the riders, themselves, in their daily practice, but also by the governing bodies through the scoring system,” Larssen continued.
“In my opinion, the current system does not adequately consider the horses’ experiences. I would like to see a new system which takes the prevalence of pain and conflict behaviors [which indicate physical or emotional distress] into account, and which rewards riders for riding their horses in open frames.”
But that’s not the only way a deep dive into equine ethology could benefit the Working Group’s curriculum.
Training the Positive
When it comes to training horses, Larssen says there are essentially two schools of thought.
The first is positive reinforcement, such as food rewards, which can be incorporated into training in what she refers to as a “quid pro quo” approach. She cites Carl Hedin as an example of a rider that embraces this philosophy.
“There is robust scientific evidence that well-timed food rewards help horses learn faster and enjoy the training process more. It’s like giving them a paycheck for a job well done,” Larssen said.
But the ethologist notes that even when using the more universally accepted ‘negative reinforcement’, this form of pressure release can still be done in an ethical and compassionate way in training.
“The trick to using negative reinforcement in an appropriate way is to build the behaviors slowly and avoid escalating the pressure if the horse doesn’t understand,” she explained.
The danger is that the ‘discomfort’ created from pressure-release easily cross the threshold into ‘pain’ or ‘fear’ when applied in the wrong ways. “Unfortunately, this is far more common than we may want to admit, and it can lead to situations like those we saw in the Helgstrand and Dujardin videos,” Larssen said.
“In these cases, we are no longer training the horse, we are simply hurting them.”
That last bit is something that equine ethologists are particularly attune to. By highlighting how horses perceive the things we do to them, behavior research can help to better guide our ethical commitments to them.
Widening the Lens
Think about the sheer number of decisions you enjoy making on any given day. Where you live, what job you’ll do, what you’ll have for breakfast and dinner that evening—and with whom.
Horses, according to Larssen, aren’t all that different.
In fact, research has shown that given the opportunity, horses will make active choices about the lives they want to live, from where to graze to who they prefer to spend time with. What’s more, the ability to make these active choices can impact a horse’s quality of life.
“While ethology provides us with the scientific base for practical considerations like equipment, training methods, stable design, feeding routines, and the importance of social companionship, I believe it can also nudge us towards a bolder, more creative re-imagining of what the horse-human relationship can be in the context of competitions,” said Larssen.
That’s a wider-lens viewpoint that’s important for all of us who engage in horse sports to, at the very least, consider. And if the FEI’s Working Group is truly seeking to renew its focus on ethics and wellbeing, ethology sounds like a logical place to start.
After all, how can you revaluate ‘welfare’ without truly considering it in the context of what the science says horses actually want and need?
“Research suggests that the very ability to make choices—to have some level of influence over their own lives—is vital to good welfare. What might a sport look like that gives horses more of a voice? This, to me, is the truly interesting question,” Larssen reflected.
“Much of the current debate around horse sport is welfare-centered, focusing on things like pain, discomfort and access to basic needs like forage and turnout. These things are very important and central to the future of horse sport. But horses’ lives are more than just the absence of pain or the presence of food.”
